Blue Ocean Strategy Wisdom: Shift from Red to Blue

Blue Ocean Strategy Wisdom: Shift from Red to Blue

People have a general tendency to seek the false comfort and security of the familiar, which helps to explain the abundance of Red Oceans. However, by shifting our focus away from the familiar through a systematic approach, new insights are gained which lead to profitable Blue Oceans. Continuing with our Blue Ocean Wisdom series, today we address this point through an excerpt entitled “Shift from Red to Blue” (from the book Blue Ocean Strategy, page 28, by Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne).

To fundamentally shift the strategy canvas of an industry, you must begin by reorienting your strategic focus from competitors to alternatives, and from customers to noncustomers of the industry. To pursue both value and cost, you should resist the old logic of benchmarking competitors in the existing field and choosing between differentiation and cost leadership. As you shift your strategic focus from current competition to alternatives and noncustomers, you gain insight into how to redefine the problem the industry focuses on and thereby reconstruct buyer value elements that reside across industry boundaries. Conventional strategic logic, by contrast, drives you to offer better solutions than your rivals to existing problems defined by your industry.

Source: http://blueoceanstrategy.typepad.com/creatingblueoceans/2007/11/blue-ocean-st-1.html